Cook for Good

How to Use Sell Books on Your Website through IndieBound

Selling books on your website through IndieBound can make you or your organization money and help support local, independent bookstores. Think of it as Amazon for local book stores. You can choose to sell through:

Any book stores that are members of Indiebound, a good choice for a website with a regional or national focus
Just through a favorite store, a good choice for organizations such as book clubs and civic organizations whose visitors are most likely to be local and will want to support a local store

Even regional or national websites may want to direct traffic towards a particular store at times, as Cook for Good did when Quail Ridge Books helped us with a benefit for the Inter-Faith Food Shuttle. But the Cook for Good library uses the first option. Authors may want to direct sales to specific stores while on a book tour or when involved with a special event.

Why do you need a tutorial?

IndieBound sends new affiliates the most common information: how to send visitors to any book store. This tutorial also shows you to support a specific book store.

Unfortunately, IndieBound may send you, as it did me, scrambled code as examples to get you started. They also sent me example code for a useful option that let your site pre-select the zipcode for stores you wanted to offer to your customer, but they discontinued that feature without notice.

In addition, IndieBound generates code on its website (at least as of this writing in August 2009) that has errors. For example:

Required alt statements are left out of HTML for images
Ampersands in the HTML are shown as plain ampersands instead of in the HTML form: &

Why does this matter? Having the correct alt descriptions will cost your website ranking in the search engines. Bad syntax can cause your page to load more slowly or not look as you expect. It may look fine on your computer, but there are many, many combinations of operation systems, browsers, and settings that could make your page wrong. IndieBound staffers have told me that they will fix these problems soon, but until they do, you need to make the corrections yourself.

Why am I providing one?

I spent an hour or so descrambling what I received from IndieBound ... and I'm a website developer. I'd like to save you that trouble. Why? I want independent book stores to thrive and for good authors and groups to thrive while supporting these stores. Maybe this will also inspire a few of you to read Cloud Atlas, the best novel of the last decade.

Applying to Sell Books through IndieBound

It's very easy to apply to sell books and to be accepted. Don't worry that your site is too small or has too little traffic.

Apply to be a member of the IndieBound Community. IndieBound will check your website to make sure that it meets their standards for members. In general, this means you can tell your neighbors what's on your site without being ridden out of town on a rail.
Receive your affilate ID.
Add code to your website.

Adding Code to Your Website

Sample code that will let your visitor pick the book store

Cloud Atlas

example code with image:
<a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780375507250?aff=YOUR_ID_HERE">
<img src="http://images.booksense.com/images/books/250/507/FC9780375507250.JPG" alt="Cloud Atlas cover" /></a>

example code with title:
<a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780375507250?aff=YOUR_ID_HERE">Cloud Atlas</a>

Sample code that lets your site pick the book store

A click takes the visitor right to the book store you have chosen to support while maintaining the affiliate ID, so the origination site gets paid. Change "YOUR_ID_HERE" to your own affiliate ID.

So if you want your website to say something like:

Buy the book Cloud Atlas and a few related titles, with Quail Ridge Books donating 20% of the sales to A Good Cause.

Use a link for Cloud Atlas that looks like this, find the book's page on website of the store to which you want to direct customers. Copy the link, change each ampersand (&) to the HTML symbol for ampersand (&) and add &nationalAffiliateCode=YOUR_ID_HERE at the end. This tells IndieBound that the customer came from you so you should get permission.

Example store-specific HTML with text

For example, the URL for Cloud Atlas on the Quail Ridge Books site is:

http://quailridgebooks.booksense.com/NASApp/store/Product?s=showproduct
&isbn=9780375507250

A link on your site using that address would look like this. The changes you would make are shown in bold below:

<a href="http://quailridgebooks.booksense.com/NASApp/store/Product?s=showproduct
&isbn=9780375507250;
&nationalAffiliateCode=YOUR_ID_HERE">Cloud Atlas </a>

Example store-specific HTML code with image

Verifying that Your Code is Valid

Click on all the links to make sure they go where you expect
Make sure your affiliate ID shows up in the address link of the browser. This is the only way that IndieBound can tell where the sale comes from and thus pay you.
Run your code through the free W3C Markup Validation Sevice. Correct syntax errors as needed.